Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

“They want to take you to the mall without me. Is that awful?”

I had been terrified that I would lose him. That Michael’s death and the blank state it had delivered me into would annul what we had begun. But he had helped me as no one else could have by insisting we go forward with finding a place to live together, even when it seemed for a few weeks that I might not get my job back. At my weakest moment, he had refused to doubt us.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

His mother and sister and I drove for twenty minutes in his mother’s ample Lincoln, through a wide grid of commercial strips whose intersections had long lights and generous turning lanes, the late-afternoon sun glinting off the columns of windshields.

“We didn’t mean to kidnap you,” his mother said. “But he’s kept you to himself long enough, and I have to ask somebody what he likes to wear these days.”

“You’re earning major points,” Valerie half whispered to me as we crossed the parking lot. “This is what she does with people she likes.”

It was Saturday and the mall was full. Parents herded small children through crowds of dashing teens. Seniors ambled along the promenade. Salespeople in chinos and polo shirts smiled vaguely from the stools of jewelry carts. A janitor mopped orange soda from the white tile floor, while above and through it all played “Friday I’m in Love,” one of the Cure’s lighter pop ballads.

“I just want to know if he’s as much of a neat freak with you as he is with us,” Seth’s mother said. “He practically alphabetizes his shirts.”

In the Brooks Brothers, I limited myself to recommending mediums over larges and suggested Seth would probably want to purchase his own jeans. When his mother pressed me to let her buy me a tie, I fended her off with Valerie’s help.

We kept at it for an hour or so, through several stores, and then sat together at a Starbucks. They asked me more questions, venturing now onto the subject of my mother, and of Celia and Paul. I did my best to reciprocate, inquiring about where in Denver they had lived when Seth was a kid, and about Valerie’s work as a guidance counselor. It was kind of them to be doing this with me, and I wanted them to know that I was glad for it.

By the time we got back to the house Seth’s father and Valerie’s husband, Rick, had arrived and were in the sprawling kitchen with Seth unloading meat from a cooler. His father was an older, rougher version of Seth, taller by a few inches, with a larger jaw and broader shoulders, and the mottled skin of a man who’d spent his life working outdoors. He had the same upright posture, the same way of gesturing with his shoulders, and he spoke in that clipped rhythm of Seth’s, flat and quick. Their resemblance was uncanny.

He gave my hand a firm shake, introduced his son-in-law, and then asked me if I liked to grill. Rick stood a few feet off holding a platter of marinated steak.

“Alec wants to talk to us,” Seth’s mother said as she leaned down beside her husband to rummage through the vegetable drawers of the fridge.

“You’re saying he can’t make up his own mind?” his father retorted, as though I were not in the room. Seth smiled at me in mock apology but remained conveniently silent. Rick’s expression suggested the better choice was to join them. Reaching over his wife’s back, Seth’s father grabbed me a beer from the top shelf, and the three of us walked out onto the patio together.

They had come from a meeting with a developer. A set of permits for a condominium on the outskirts of downtown had been delayed, costing their firm thousands of dollars. They included me in their talk of the minutiae of contracting as though I were an old pro.

“I’ve been telling Seth for a couple years we need a designer,” his father said. “He’s got a job here anytime he wants it.”

The burnished gold of his father’s wedding ring and the gold face of his watch caught the light of the flames. I found it hard not to keep staring at him, the way he had planted himself in front of the grill, moving only his hands and arms as he flipped the slabs of meat with a fork, addressing his comments to the fire. I wondered how he saw me. What did he think of the man who slept with his son? Did my presence force him to imagine it? Had his wife instructed him to accept me? Had he ever desired another man himself?

At the dinner table he stood at the head and carved the steak into strips, arranging them on the plates his wife held out for him, making sure everyone had been served before sitting. As we ate, Seth reported on our plans for a trip up to the mountains early the following week, and Valerie and her mother made suggestions for places we should stop along the way. When Rick asked me what kind of work I did, Seth’s mother answered for me, informing him that I wrote about politics. At that point a quiet descended on the table.

“If those congressmen sell themselves any faster,” Seth’s father said, “they’ll be shipping their own jobs to China.”

I laughed. And soon everyone was laughing, nervously relieved, Seth most of all. He slid a hand onto my knee under the table and squeezed it. I couldn’t remember the last time I had let go even this much. His father, delighted with the response to his quip, began to opine on government corruption and shoddy foreign building materials, and the uncertainties of interest rates, until eventually his wife told him he was boring us and announced there was pie.

I imagined Celia rolling her eyes at the scene of Valerie and her mother clearing the dishes and disappearing into the kitchen to tidy and wash while the four men kept their seats. But then Seth got up to help them, leaving the three of us alone once again.

“Let’s fix you a drink,” his father said, signaling with a tilt of his head for Rick and me to go through with him into the den. There a leather-topped bar with brass edging and a mirrored shelf stood against a paneled wall. Darkwood beams ran the length of the ceiling. There were birch logs stacked in the grate of a raised hearth. At the far end of the room a brown leather sofa and chairs faced a flat-screen lit up by the vivid colors of a basketball game playing out in silence.

“Rick here is bourbon, and I think tonight I am too — what can I get you, Alec?” He rested his hand on the amber bottle as he awaited my answer, the underside of his link bracelet touching the leather of the bar’s surface.

“Bourbon’s fine,” I said.

He palmed ice into the tumblers and poured three generous drinks.

“Cheers,” he said, looking me in the eye for the first time, just for an instant, and offering a small nod of the head, as if allowing me still further into the circle of his acknowledgment. Rick did the same when I glanced at him, and the three of us clinked glasses. It was a simple, male gesture, this little close-lipped dip of the chin, the eyes meeting ever so briefly. I’d given and received the nod a thousand times. It was what remained, I suppose, of tipping your hat. But I’d always experienced it as more than that. As a forswearing of an implicit threat of violence. A sign, between men, of disarmament.

“Cheers,” I replied, aware of the closeness of their bodies to mine — Seth’s father’s big frame, Rick’s barrel chest and thick legs. These two men I had only just met were granting me an unspoken acceptance, giving me that minimal respect of belonging with them. But only in the narrowest sense. I’d earned the right in their eyes to be treated as a man. As a participant in the basic competition among all men.

Just noticing this, not letting it pass as an ordinary fact of meeting strangers, unclenched something in me. A fist in my gut. A bracing against attack.

I tried listening to their talk about suppliers and the housing market but I couldn’t focus on their words. I saw their lips and eyes move, their weight shift, and as I watched them I understood clearly and for the first time that this was the reason part of me had come to loathe Michael. His refusal to be like other men. His refusal to compete. To live in the grip of that fist, the way I always had, and the way these men did. And I glimpsed what I had never allowed myself to admit before, which is that somewhere in me lay a hatred of my father, too, though for the opposite reason — for playing the game but being too weak to win it. A hatred I’d kept hidden from myself as a boy but never let go of, and which his death and my pity for him had prevented me from owning up to all these years.